News Archive 2014

Ashutosh Varshney, professor of political science and director of the Brown-India Program, comments on the pledge by Narendra Modi, a front-runner in the race for prime minister in India, to clean up the Ganges River. Varshney says that while all would embrace the idea, it wouldn't necessarily get Modi more votes.

Watson Visiting Fellow Timothy Edgar talks to Forbes about reform in the NSA: “I think it would be naive to assume we are going to limit intelligence collection to only international security threats.”

Patricia Herlihy, professor of history emerita and adjunct professor at the Watson Institute, writes about Vladimir Putin’s disregard for Russian and Ukrainian history in an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times.

According to a report by the National Research Council, the rise of incarceration in the US caused a 400 percent increase in state spending between 1980 and 2009. An article in the Washington Post examines the findings of the two-year study, which "concludes that all of its costs — for families, communities, state budgets and society — have simply not been worth the benefit in deterrence and crime reduction."Glenn Loury, the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of Social Science and professor of economics at Brown and an expert on the economics of race and inequality, serves on the National Research Council’s Standing Committee on Law and Justice, which commissioned the report. Loury is a faculty fellow at the Watson Institute.

Ashutosh Varshney, professor of political science, comments on the changes creeping into India's future elections: “A rapidly urbanising India is going to be less accepting of dynasties, more open to new types of candidates.”

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Stephen Kinzer, visiting fellow at the Watson Institute, writes about the impending release of a congressional report on the CIA’s use of extreme tactics like “extraordinary rendition” and “enhanced interrogation techniques” and why the U.S. and other countries should own up to their "misdeeds."

At a conference on climate change in Latin America held at Brown on Wednesday, Manuel Pulgar Vidal, Peru’s Environment Minister, spoke about how countries could work together to make progress at the upcoming UN climate summit in Peru this fall.

Beshara Doumani, professor of modern Middle East history, appears in a new documentary, "It's Better to Jump," about the port city of Akka (also known as Acre), one of the places where the conflict over ownership of Palestinian history and culture is most stark.

Brown University is taking steps to establish itself as the premier center in the U.S. for the study of Brazil, and it’s starting things off by making a trove of once-classified documents accessible to the public.

Watson Adjunct Faculty Catherine Kelleher, and Judith Reppy of Cornell University receive the MacArthur Foundation grant at Cornell for research on “Creating Conditions for a Stable Transition to a New Nuclear Order".

Stephen Kinzer, visiting fellow at the Watson Institute, writes about the cautious negotations that the U.S. and Iran taking part in and the two countries shared problems with opiate addiction, which Kinzer suggests could be tackled together.

In an blog post for the Monkey Cage in the Washington Post, Jeff Colgan, who will be assistant professor of political science and international studies at the Watson Institute starting July 1, outlines concerns over energy’s role in the crisis in Ukraine: “Europeans should get serious about an energy policy that is consistent with their political and environmental values.”